Geok
Depe - Mosque, Fortress Ruins and Cemetary
40 minutes by car from Ashgabat. This site includes the
remains of the ancient fortress Geok-Depe (Green Hill
) and modern Mosque Geok-Depe. Geok-Depe is a fortress
from the 19th century where a particular bloody battle
(1881) was fought between the Turkmen and the Russians
who were attempting to take over Turkmenistan. In January
1881 the Russians had surrounded the Geok Depe fortress
and begun to bombard it. There had been 10,000 Turcoman
troops inside its massive walls, most of them cavalry,
as well as nearly 40,000 civilians. Skobelev himself had
7,000 infantry and cavalry, and 60 guns and rocket batteries.
The Russians found themselves under heavy fire from the
ramparts. Skobelev ordered his engineers to tunnel to
a point beneath the wall where a mine could be explored.
If they dug quickly, the officer in charge would be rewarded
with vodka and champagne. As fierce fighting continued
overhead, the sappers had got to within twenty-five yards
of the wall without detection. Progress now began to slow,
due to the difficulty of getting air to the differs, but
finally the tunnel was ready. Two tons of explosives were
carried along it by volunteers to a position directly
beneath the wall. Shortly, as the storming parties waited
in readiness, the mine was ignited. Simultaneously the
full fury of Skobelev's artillery and rocket batteries
was turned against the same part of the wall. The result
was an enormous explosion, which sent a huge column of
earth and rubble skywards. Together with the artillery
fire it blew a gap nearly fifty yards wide in the wall,
instantly killing several hundred of the defenders. The
Russian storming party now poured into the fortress, while
at other points, using scaling ladders brought up under
cover of darkness the previous night, Skobelev's troops
swarmed over the walls. Hand-to-hand fighting followed
for possession of the fortress. Unprepared for the sudden
appearance of the Russians in their midst, and still stunned
by the violence of the explosion, the Turcomans soon began
to give ground. General Skobelev was one of the Russian
Tsar's most outstanding and colorful soldiers. Nicknamed
"the White General" by his troops because he invariably
rode into battle in a dazzling white uniform and on a
has a white charger. He also had a reputation for ruthlessness
and cruelty which had earned him the name of "old Bloody
Eyes" among the Turcomans. In 1996 a magnificent mosque
was built to commemorate the battle of Geok-Depe.